The Grand Battle
The Grand Battle is a text-based story collab run by Cyber95. Due to its success, seven more games have been scheduled, to provide eight winners who will go on to fight in Grand Battle All-Stars. Gameplay In a format which has been replicated in further Battles, there are seven "rounds" in which character interaction, fighting, and general roleplaying/storytelling take place. Despite the fact that the setting is a deathmatch, no characters can actually die (though this is out-of-character knowledge.) After a reasonable time, Cyber95 selects the "weakest link" in the story to be eliminated. The player controlling the eliminated character then writes their own death into the story. Once a death has occured Cyber95 writes a scene change, drastically altering the setting the players must fight in. The first, in a tradition emulated in later games, stems from a well-known MSPAFA, the mechanics of which the contestants can utilise. From then the only consistent feature for settings appears to be places which blatantly disregard the laws of physics in various ways. Plot Prologue A mysterious entity known only as the Director orders eight men, sworn to secrecy, to seek out the most powerful fighters to take part in a deathmatch. After assembling the contestants in a pocket dimension christened "The Holding Cell," he introduces them to one another and outlines the proceedings. The contestants' visions fade, the scene replaced by the grassy field of the Mutewood. Round 1: The Mutewood The first round is set in the Mutewood, the quintessential house in the field of grass. Eximo ignores the other contestants and spends all its time ridding the house of filth, pausing only to aggress those who dare interrupt it. Emily attempts to establish an alliance against the demonic contestants; Lutherion and Eximo. Lutherion establishes himself as a key antagonist, summoning minions hither and thither, forcing the other contestants to work together to defeat the necromancer's army. The Mutewood starts conjuring up illusions, including the purple sky and the corpse and gun in the shower (which Eximo clean up). Aeon overcomes the illusions and uses them to his advantage, finally subduing Lutherion. Emily tries to heal the necromancer back to life before executing him. The process just fails to succeed, when Dorukomets brags that killing Lutherion will be easy. The ghost is instead consumed by Lutherion's Wightmaw arm, and Dorukomets is eliminated from the competition. Round 2: Free Falling The Mutewood disappears, and is replaced with a perpetual freefall loop. Five buildings fall, keeping pace with each other, and the only way to navigate between them is to slow or speed one's descent. The contestants find various ways to control their movement: Alcarith turns into her dragon form, Lutherion summons wings, Aeon creates drag with his adaptive tool. Eximo chooses to stay in his starting location, the general store, to cannibalise the vaccum cleaners and make a cleansing army. Amethyst plants a sticky bomb on Lutherion; this bomb is scheduled to explode in 30 minutes and must always be attached to at least one contestant. Amethyst joins Emily and Nathan and they plan to use Dorukomet's intangibility to make an escape from the Battle. Lutherion appears and summons Dorukomets to attack Amethyst, putting her at his mercy until Eximo's bots attack Lutherion. The fighting is called off once Amethyst explains that the power sources maintaining the freefall are liable to explode, now that the five buildings have collided into each other. The contestants interested in survival over fighting get to work trying to destroy the gravity generators, but Aeon secretly plants the bomb on Alcarith's person; knowing that with only minutes left on the countdown it's a far quicker way to finish the round. Eximo is aware of Aeon's treachery but is halted by a mistrustful Emily. The bomb goes off, the perpetual loops ends, but before the contestants hit the ground the scene changes to... Round 3: KillVille With a map based off a game of Werewolves, a street littered with knives, and the stench of blood everywhere, most contestants fight nausea when entering the map. Eximo sets off to clean all the blood, still despondent about failing at completing the cleansing in the previous map. Lutherion stirs up more trouble and picks a fight with Nathan, who fends him off with his knife, but the knife somehow breaks all the bones in his arm. Aeon goes and finds something to eat, Emily confronts him over his role in Alcarith's death but Aeon is calmly dismissive. Lutherion reveals that while his heart resides in the Wightmaw, he cannot be killed, and Amethyst and he duke it out in the town hall; Eximo and Emily try to assist the technomancer but are repelled by Lutherion's guards. Eximo works around this by entering through a wall; Emily returns to Nathan to check on him. Nathan, meanwhile, asks Aeon how he can go about effectively using his weapon. Aeon explains all that is necessary is to find a loophole; he cites the nature of his own adaptive tool as an example. Nathan gets the wrong end of the stick and unwittingly makes a deal with the demon dwelling inside it who takes great amusement from making Nathan see horrible hallucinations and turning him into its personal puppet. Emily returns to this and is extremely pissed off. Amethyst, Eximo, and Lutherion continue to fight in the town hall and eventually reach an impasse. Amethyst and Eximo flee to the house Nathan and Emily are hiding in, Lutherion chases them with more undead servants. Emily orders Amethyst to protect Nathan while she heads out searching for a strange life-form which popped up on Amethyst's scans which Aeon went searching for earlier. Aeon's search turns up a werewolf, wandering round the village who immediately gives chase. Lutherion complicates matters by summoning the Festering Behemoth, one of the biggest monsters residing in his arm. Amethyst joins the fight, ordering Nathan to stay out of danger like Emily requested, but he follows to try and get a shot at defeating Lutherion. He does a decent job attacking the Festering Behemoth, everyone else chips in too. Emily tries again ''to restore Lutherion's humanity and sanity by sacrificing her own life force, it seems to work for a moment with Lutherion's human side showing through before he shoots the magic straight back and the werewolf eviscerates her. As she lies dying, she offers her last reserves of strength to Aeon to place in his adaptive tool, on the condition her strength be used to protect Nathan; him being the one with the most claim to any innocence in this battle. Round 4: Pop-up Land While the events in KillVille were occuring, the Director requested from the six gentlemen remaining (in other words, from the users who still had characters in the battle) a suggestion on a slip of paper on how to structure the next battlefield. From this pool came the following result: A multidimensional world with three different "scenes" within it, like different pages of a book. With all contestants on page 1, on the discovery and use of a "page-turning" button somewhere, the world would collapse in on itself and reopen on a new scene, with players roughly the same distance from each other in the new plane. On Page 1 the world was full of giant, floating cubes where every surface counted as the ground; on Page 2 the pop-up-book theme dominated in the landscape, along with a giant crystal whose healing powers extended over to the other pages; and on page three the rune for Chaos itself had been inscribed, creating a scape of broken floating islands. One was adorned with an Escher-esque fountain, which is actually the same space as the fountain in Grand Battle II's Round 3 had been set in, although while in GBI the fountain appeared to stand on its own isolated island, in GBII it led onto a maze of hallways and corridors along with several other parts of the map. The other islands included the remnants of the healing crystal (now shattered), an island with a sandstorm, and several others including the remnants of the cubes from page 1. Nathan is now fully under the demon's control, and tries to kill everyone under the hallucination they are all Lutherion. The cubes' warped physics hampers the contestants, when Eximo hits the page-turning switch to the page with the healing crystal. This makes his demonic parts malfunction as well as making Lutherion enter a painful state of constant regeneration and death. In its now-autonomous attempts to clean, Eximo nudges Lutherion into the crystal's core, fully restoring him to life but interfering with his Wightmaw arm, releasing all the trapped spirits within the form of Dorukomets. Aeon aggravates the legion of souls and Dorukomets blows up the healing crystal, restoring Lutherion's undead state and letting Eximo move again and find the switch to the last page of Pop-Up Land. Here, Lutherion swiftly adapts to having lost his armful of minions, and Amethyst escapes from her fight with a crazed Nathan and inscribes a message by a Escheresque waterfall to any other contestants in any other Grand Battles. (As it turns out, parts of the world in Round 3 of GBII connected with Pop-Up Land, so Vyrm'n read the note.) Aeon and Nathan engage in a deathmatch that results in Aeon escaping with one eye missing. Amethyst tries to persuade Lutherion to assist in their escape from the Battle, but he instead gains control of her body and makes her fight Eximo on the wasteland island. Aeon retreats to some remnants of cubes, Nathan returns to the island with the healing crystal before throwing Dorukomets/Lutherion's Army into the Grand Battle II universe. Lutherion, Eximo, and Amethyst reach Nathan on their wasteland island; Eximo throws a bunch of healing crystal shards at Amethyst to counteract Lutherion's dark magic. The shards also make Lutherion enter a state of half-life, half-death. Nathan feverishly fights the real Lutherion, but strikes the killing blow after Amethyst torches the necromancer for his inability to see beyond the confines of the Battle. Lutherion thanks Nathan with his dying breath, and the Gentleman who brought the necromancer, Dexter, gets up to leave. However, the Director has a plan for him in... Round 5: Battleopolis! Uh... what happened here? Big city with psychological barriers to escape rather than physical, Nathan/Demon kills loads of people, Amethyst works like mad to find a way out along with Dexter's reluctant assistance, Eximo gets in trouble with the cops. Aeon encounters a few old friends, and then finally embarks on the promise he made to Emily to free Nathan. Characters come back from the dead or past, including Lutherion, Emily, Alcarith, and Konka Rar. A better summary once the round is over, methinks. Characters *'The Director''' (Cyber95) - The mysterious, multidimensional entity which ordered the Grand Battle. *'Lutherion Maw '(dexexe1234) - An insane, undead necromancer whose "wightmaw arm" is composed entirely of his minions. He is afraid of fire and the colour red, after dying in a fire. Nathan finally kills him in Pop-Up Land. *'Alcarith' (fait) - A dragon in human form. Generally friendly, is blown up by the sticky bomb in Round II. *'Dorukomets' (almost-there) - An egotistical ghost who did little until trying to take down Lutherion in the Mutewood, at which point Lutherion killed him. Provides a refuge from Eximo for the other souls in the Wightmaw Arm in Pop-up Land. Due to a convoluted series of events, he ends up surviving, but in the context of Grand Battle II. *'Amethyst' (Draykon) - A technomancic former human. She is cautious and analytical, but is a proficient fighter when provoked. She is perpetually trying to find loopholes in the "game" to escape with minimum bloodshed. *'Eximo Pulvis' (Dragon Fogel) - An amalgamation of souls bound to a vaccum cleaner. Eximo is obsessed with cleansing everything, and does not respond to others unless they disrupt the cleansing. True to its almost robotic nature, Eximo is clinically analytical. *'Nathan Finley' (Oddguy) - An average high-school student who wields a kitchen-knife possesed by a powerful demon lord. Initially he managed to avoid using it, but after doing a deal in Killville the demon started to make him suffer from hallucinations and try and kill his allies. The demon finally took control of him, and he died in Battleopolis. *'Emily Trenwye' (PawntoD4) - A veteran human priestess specialising in healing and defensive magic. Despite her prejudice towards seeing all demons as murderous monstrosities, she risked and lost her life trying to restore Lutherion's humanity. She grants Aeon the last of her strength on the condition he uses it to protect Nathan. *'Aeon Ferrous' (Aryogaton) - An adaptable human who's a jack-of-all-trades. Generally he prefers not to fight unless in self-defence or to protect an ally. His adaptive tool can turn into anything Aeon requires, but it needs careful concentration not to sap him of his strength. Others *'The Gentlemen - '''The name given to the eight (assumed spatial) mages who each brought one contestant to the Director for the Battle. *'Dexter - 'The Gentleman who brought Lutherion to the battle; he was banished into Battleopolis after breaking the rules of the Battle by forewarning Lutherion. *'Konka Rar '''- A cyborg lich who created Eximo Pulvis. A copy was made of him in Battleopolis. Category:Collaborations Category:Cyber95 adventures Category:MSPAFA Award Nominees